Tuesday, September 30 - 6PM

Discussion with Bernard E. Harcourt on Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory

The James Gallery - CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016

Join us at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, for a conversation with Bernard E. Harcourt on his book Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia University Press, 2023), presented in conjunction with the exhibition Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

In his book, Harcourt writes, “Cooperation is pervasive in contemporary economy and society, often hidden in plain sight and unacknowledged. It operates in the shadows of advanced capitalist economies. Its omnipresence demonstrates the possibility and potential of an economic regime based on coöperism.” From consumer co-ops to worker cooperatives, mutual aid networks to nonprofits, Harcourt points to collective models that embody democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and sustainability beyond electoral politics.

Cooperation resonates with the history of the Workshop– Blackburn’s private art studio and developed into an artist-run cooperative from 1953 - 1971, before its incorporation as a nonprofit. Today, as a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, it remains the oldest community printshop in the United States.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties, and a faculty affiliate in the departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS), the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Harcourt is the founding director of the Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.

His most recent book, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (2023), offers the blueprint for a society based on cooperation. His other recent book, Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (2020), charts a vision for political action and social transformation. In The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), Harcourt examines how techniques of counterinsurgency warfare spread to U.S. domestic policy and policing. His previous books include Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015), The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007), Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (2001), and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (2013), with W. J. T. Mitchell and Michael Taussig. In addition, Harcourt has edited or co-edited and annotated many volumes of the lectures of philosopher Michel Foucault in French and English, as well as the French edition of Discipline and Punish for the official Pléiade edition of the complete works at Gallimard. 

Harcourt began his legal career representing individuals on Alabama’s death row, working with Bryan Stevenson at what is now the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama. He continues to represent pro bono persons sentenced to death and life imprisonment without parole, as well as those detained at Guantanamo Bay. In 2019, Harcourt was awarded the New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award, a lifetime achievement award for his work on behalf of individuals on death row.

Learn more here.

This event is presented by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, a program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and funded by the Terra Foundation. Following its presentation at the James Gallery - CUNY Graduate Center, Press & Pull will travel to the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) in Boston, opening in early 2026.